- Focus on what is to be learned today, not over the next several weeks. If a lesson is going to extend over several days, try to determine the learning focus for each day and make that your goal statement.

- Explain the learning in the goal statement, not the assignment or activity. Just because students complete an activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean they learned anything. Be careful if you are including the task as well as the learning in the goal statement –many students will pay more attention to the task than to what they are expected to learn.

- Use verbs to indicate the kind of thinking students will be expected to do. Words like ‘summarize’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘identify’ are much better than ‘understand’, ‘learn’, or ‘know’.

- Write the goal so that successful achievement of it requires grade-level work. If students can achieve without working at grade level, they aren’t being given the opportunity to work to high expectations and you can’t use the results of their work in your evaluations.

- Visualize what a successful learner will be able to do as a result of achieving the goal (success criteria) and think about how your students might demonstrate this criteria. Good goals are assessable!

Coming next week: 4 Tests to Determine Goal Quality

1. Human behaviour is goal-directed. When students attend to a clearly written goal and the information that supports its’ achievement, that information moves into working memory. When there isn’t a clear goal, students aren’t sure what they should be attending to and without attention there’s no way to store and process information.

2. Goals don’t just make initial learning easier. Because students are working with focus and purpose, they are also able to more readily transfer knowledge to familiar and unfamiliar situations both within and beyond the provided subject area.

3. When you know exactly what you want students to know, understand and be able to do, you will know what successful achievement looks like. That knowledge makes both differentiation and assessment very easy to do. If, on the other hand, you start with an activity and then try to differentiate or assess it without a clear goal, chances are good that the work will not be aligned with the most salient features of the learning.

4. Clear goals help students to develop the metacognitive awareness that is necessary for both critical and creative thought. This is because a good goal is focused on learning, rather than an assignment.

5. Feedback is considered one of the most effective ways of improving student performance. Good feedback has three stages: telling students what they are doing well relative to the learning goal; telling students what they need to improve relative to the learning goal, and using a combination of pressure and support so that students persist until success has been achieved. Feedback loses its potency when there is no learning goal.

6. Goals keep teachers focused on student thinking rather than student activity. I’ll say more about this in subsequent posts.

Coming next week –5 Key Principles of Effective Learning Goals

I confess to being a bit of a connoisseur when it comes to these supplies; I’m quite prepared to pay more to get index cards that look marbled and sticky notes in interesting shapes and bright colours. However, if I were still teaching in a classroom, I would be making regular visits to my local dollar store to stock up on large quantities of a variety of basic supplies that make a difference to student learning.

Here’s what I’d buy and why:

Highlighters

A single colour of highlighter can be used by students while they read to isolate specifics such as words they don’t understand, support for inferences, or answers to questions. A variety of coloured highlighters can be used after reading to focus on and identify different structural elements of a text. Colour coding helps the brain to quickly identify different categories of information in a text, making highlighting useful for visual learners of all ages. It’s even recommended for law students learning to write briefs. The easiest highlighter colours to see are yellow, orange, and pink. Alternatively, you can provide students with various colours of highlighter tape, which has the benefits of being easily removable so as not to permanently mark textbooks, and reusable.

Sticky Notes

The more actively involved students are in processing information, the better. For that reason, sticky notes are one of the best resources teachers can provide. Students can use them to flag places in a text where their comprehension breaks down; mark parts of a text they’d like to talk about, or to record thoughts they want to contribute to a mind map or brainstorming session. Sticky notes can be used for a variety of assessment tasks, to support students with special needs, or for art, although this last one applies only when students have a lot of spare time and you have hundreds of dollars to spend on notes.

Index Cards

Small, recipe-sized index cards are useful whenever you want students to submit information that you need to sort. Because the index cards are stiffer than normal paper, they are easier to sort into groups when, for example, students give you an exit card summarizing their understanding of a concept. Index cards are also great for research purposes—as students research, they can record the citation information on one side of the card and quotations or interesting ideas from the text on the other side. If a card is used for each idea, the cards can then be sequenced to create an outline for the essay or research paper. And finally, for a bit of creative levity, check out this list of ten ways to cram a lot of information onto a card when you allow students to bring a single index card into a test situation.

Individual Whiteboards

You can purchase individual whiteboards from a dollar store or make your own by cutting up large sheets of melamine. Students can use old socks as whiteboard erasers and as holders for dry erase markers. Teachers have found dozens of uses for individual whiteboards, from developing the skills of students in language classes to teaching algebra in secondary math classrooms. Whiteboards keep students actively involved in learning, and provide teachers with immediate feedback on student understanding of the concepts we teach.

Regardless of the school supply you choose, and whether you use it in tangible or virtual form, highlighters, sticky notes, index cards, and individual whiteboards support active involvement by the diverse learners in our classrooms.

There are many different kinds of graphic organizers, often categorized according to common text patterns such as compare and contrast, cause—effect, and time—sequence. Here are 58 examples of graphic organizers.

When teaching students how to use specific graphic organizers, start with explicit instruction where you model how to complete the organizer. Since the process of completing the organizer is new, be sure to use content that is familiar to students. Then provide students with guided practice in using the organizer, again using familiar content.

Once students are at the stage of independent application, have them select the appropriate organizer for their assessment task or create their own. The key to using graphic organizers as an assessment technique is to have students choose or create the organizer that best suits their purpose because this will tell you whether they understand the relationships and patterns in the concepts you have taught. If you provide the organizer, you may only be able to assess whether students knew where to record specific information. (Refer to the handouts section of this website to find Blackline Master T5 from my book 50 Tools and Techniques for Classroom Assessment. You can use Blackline Master T5 to assess the appropriateness of a student’s selection of organizer.)

Make multiple copies of graphic organizers that you have taught, and have them available for students to access at any time. Alternatively, since many graphic organizers are simple, post a single example of each organizer. Then, have students quickly create them as needed, or provide materials that will allow students with a kinesthetic preference to construct their own graphic organizers. For example, rather than photocopying Venn diagrams, provide students with a ball of wool and sticky notes and have them create desktop Venn diagrams. If you need a record of the work, you can take a digital photograph. Where possible, you might also try to give students the opportunity to use software, such as Inspiration or SMART Ideas, to create and complete graphic organizers on a computer. Research shows that students create more complex graphic organizers on screen than they do by hand.

I’m going to be in Louisville to speak at the NMSA/AMLE annual conference. The acronyms stand for ‘National Middle School Association’, recently renamed as the ‘Association for Middle Level Education.’ If you have ever felt like the middle child in education –neglected and ignored—you’ll applaud the purpose of this wonderful organization. AMLE’s mission is to be “the voice for those committed to the educational and developmental needs of young adolescents.”

AMLE, through publications and conferences, supports our professional learning in all of the areas that matter to us as educators. At the conference there will be more than 600 sessions in 60 topic areas from at-risk students to world languages. There are speed learning sessions – roundtables where multiple experts meet around different aspects of a topic, and there are active networking sessions where participants can gather according to their teaching or leadership focus and set their own session agendas.

There are also featured sessions. I’m doing two featured sessions on Saturday:

Tuned Out: Engaging the 21st Century Learner from 9:45-11:00 (program book code #3201)

Whole Class Differentiation from 12:00 until 1:15 (program book code #3301)

I attended the NMSA conference several years ago when it was held in Nashville. It was great but I have to admit that I felt really overwhelmed. There were so many people, so many great sessions to consider. I stuck close to the friend who attended with me, went to some sessions, then spent a fair bit of my time in the exhibit hall buying books.

This year I’m attending alone but I’m not at all concerned because life is so different. I’ll be there to speak (yay!) and three of my books are now being distributed by AMLE and will be available in the exhibit hall (double yay!) Best of all, social media has turned strangers into friends and I am looking forward to meeting many of the wonderful people I have communicated with through twitter and these blog posts.

See you in Louisville!

P.S. – If you’re still uncertain about attending, here are 12 good reasons to change your mind.

The creative contributions of polymaths are often influenced by the cross-pollination of ideas from different domains. Your students may not be polymaths, but since a topic of interest causes an individual to pay greater attention it’s worth the effort to find out what they are interested in and to use that information in your teaching. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out, “It is not enough for information to be clear and rational; it also has to be interesting. Learning has to be engaging and rewarding for students to learn.”

There are two categories of interest: individual disposition toward a topic, and situational interest, which is based on novelty. Both are useful in the classroom as long as they focus on the essential knowledge, understanding and skills related to your subject matter.

Find out about students’ individual interests by using inventories or by simply asking them to identify which aspects of a topic they find most interesting. Respond to individual interests by:

– inviting students to teach the class about something that is important to them.
– occasionally providing students with a few hours when they can tackle a project of personal interest or solve a problem of their choice. Call this FedEx Day to emphasize that, like the courier company, you expect that students will deliver.
– sometimes create heterogeneous groups composed of students with varied interests. This can lead to the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that polymaths benefit from.
– knowing your subject matter thoroughly so you can provide examples and analogies that relate to a variety of student interests.

Create and respond to situational interest by:

– playing games related to subject content.
– sharing unusual information about the content.
– asking questions that highlight novel aspects of the content.

I’ve posted a useful handout for discovering the interests of your students in the Handouts section of my website.

The winners of the three copies of Tuned Out are R. Scott Wallace and Mr. Lau.

Mr Lau’s story, in particular, I felt was a great example of classroom disengagement with a happy ending:

We were having a really poor relationship as a Year 8 (8th grade) class. Students were calling out, being rude, reluctant to participate, making slow progress etc. The course was 3 years old and stagnant. It had evolved slightly year on year, but what we needed was not evolution but revolution. I decided, one day to address this with the students. Tell them that I can see that they were disengaged and not enjoying the content or the delivery and this made me disengaged too.

I then asked them to brainstorm things that they wanted to learn. I teach ICT (technology), we made a list and I still have that list on a scrap of paper today, as it transformed our class, the relationship and the learning. The list consisted of skills and knowledge which the students wanted to learn about and saw as more appealing than plain spreadsheets, databases and theory. E.g. How to unfreeze your computer when it crashes, how to make a music video, how to make an animation, how to make things look good i.e. graphic design, how to code “like they do in the social network movie”, how to take good photographs. I promised them that each week, we would cover one either at the start or end of the lesson or as the main part of the lesson. The next 6 weeks were so much fun and the results outstanding. Students produced stop frame animation, music videos, learnt new skills in photoshop, made mock advertisements! They also learned a lot, more so than they would if I’d followed the curriculum plan that I had evolved from a pretty shoddy plan 4 years ago. From now on, I will always use that dialog.

Students know what will engage them. We just need to listen. We might all learn something new in the end and tease out some incredible work from the most disengaged learners.

There are so many wonderful elements to Mr. Lau’s story. Specifically, I appreciate his

- recognition that the source of the problem was the outdated course, not the students. When students are being rude and are reluctant to participate, it is very easy and very normal to want to blame them.

- understanding that when students’ perspectives on learning and teaching are actively sought, students feel more ownership and connection to school. And when their perspectives influence instructional approaches, student engagement soars. Here are a couple of sites for further information about student voice - one from Ontario and one from Australia

- differentiation of course content based on student interests. Stay tuned for my upcoming blog post about working with student interests.

Mr. Lau has his own wonderful blog where he regularly posts information and his own teaching experiences related to his passion for creativity and innovation in education through technology. I’ve bookmarked the site and look forward to learning from him!